Thanks MSHH, great to hear from you. By the way, management an hour ago responded to my last night email, so we added their comments to the site a half hour ago. Here they are, with my comment at the end:

"'The entire industry had been anticipating an economic recovery in the second half of 2002 and unfortunately, this hasn't materialised. As this recovery has evaporated, we have experienced an increase in the back-end loading of our quarters. Furthermore, Q3 is a quarter that includes two 'holiday' months, making it effectively a one-month quarter -- this means we didn't expect to see significant bookings until September.

While our sales pipeline and backlog of signed contracts give us reasonable visibility in our business, the persistent difficult market conditions mean that the timing of the close of licensing deals is unpredictable. We were still working up to Monday to close deals, some of which have slipped into Q4. We do fully expect to close these deals, although there is still a possibility that other Q4 deals may slip to Q1 2003.'

Subpar lawyering again. Deal timing is an issue every quarter, and Q3 is vacation time every year. How gullible do they think we are?"

There is no way around the fact that their July press release is at the very least at odds with their current explanations and at worst -- well, you know. Shareholders have been played.

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